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Elderly and Home Alone, Women Soak up Aid
By Kate Legge, The Australian
Australia
July 27, 2005
Elderly women accessing community services to remain at home outnumber men three to one.
This is revealed in the latest overview of who is benefiting from commonwealth-funded programs designed to help elderly and frail people stay in familiar neighbourhoods instead of taking the often traumatic step into nursing homes.
The Australian Institute of Health's report on who is getting community services, to be released today, shows that women are three times more likely than men to be living on their own.
There were 10,886 women living alone and receiving services in 2003-04, compared with 3422 men.
Of those in the oldest age bracket of 90 plus, there were 3000 women compared with 1000 men.
Community services provide mostly elderly people with assistance in cleaning, cooking, personal hygiene, shopping and getting dressed.
First introduced in 1992 as part of a policy shift away from residential care, the number of support packages continue to increase as the population ages.
In 1992 there were 235 packages of home-based care. Last year there were nearly 30,000.
The snapshot of independent women living well into their 90s confirms a futuristic glimpse of an Australia dominated by this demographic Titan that was contained in population projections released by the Bureau of Statistics two weeks ago.
In all three scenarios of possible population increases, women accounted for more than half of the number of people living alone. This is expected to increase from 1.8million in 2001 to between 2.8million and 3.7million in 2026.
Longevity and women's resilience is credited with the trend. Men die earlier and have a tendency, when younger, to live alone before marriage and starting a family.
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